a new book reveals evidence that Kurt Cobain was murdered, according to the news today, and a press release from a NYC publisher:
hard to believe, but anything is possible, forensics-wise…
ATRIA BOOKS announces new book on circumstances surrounding the death of Kurt Cobain:
At the time of his 1994 death, Kurt Cobain was leaving his wife Courtney Love and had booked two plane tickets out of Seattle for himself and a mystery woman who Courtney believed to be Kurt’s new girlfriend, according to a new book based on the exclusive case tapes of Love’s former private investigator.
“In Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain”, published today by Atria Books in New York, investigative journalists Max Wallace and Ian Halperin reveal that only an hour before Cobain went missing from an LA drug rehab facility in April, 1994, he had called United Airlines to book the tickets, which were still unused when Cobain was found dead in a room above his garage a week later.
After a nine-year investigation into the circumstances of Cobain’s death, Wallace and Halperin – former winners of the Rolling Stone Magazine Award for Investigative Journalism – conclude that the rock icon was almost certainly murdered.
Relying on a leaked autopsy report and Seattle Police Department records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, they reveal that the official suicide scenario was scientifically impossible. The records show that Cobain had ingested a triple lethal dose of heroin, before his life was ended with a shotgun bullet, suggesting a murder staged to look like a suicide. The authors interview a coroner who believes the forensic evidence suggests somebody gave Cobain an overly pure dose of heroin, waited for him to lose consciousness and then positioned the shotgun so that it appeared Cobain had pulled the trigger. No legible fingerprints were found on the shotgun, despite the fact that at least three people had handled it that week.
The authors obtained hours of explosive tapes recorded by Courtney Love’s former P.I., Tom Grant, who taped all his conversation with Courtney, her attorney and others in the days immediately before and after Kurt’s death. Grant later went public, implicating Courtney in her husband’s death. In these tapes, Courtney admits that Kurt was in the process of leaving her and that she had filed a false police report in the days before Kurt’s death, suggesting that Kurt was suicidal. The report was instrumental in convincing the police and Medical Examiner that Cobain’s death was an “open and shut case of suicide” when they arrived on the scene where his body was found on April 8, 1994, a suicide note apparently by his side. The media later reported that Cobain had barricaded himself in a room with a stool before killing himself with a shotgun, but police records obtained by the authors contradict this scenario and prove that the murder theory is more than plausible.
In the tapes, Courtney’s own attorney, Rosemary Carroll, who was godmother to the couple’s daughter Frances Bean, tells Grant that she believes Cobain was murdered and that the so-called suicide note was “forged.” She also confirms that the couple were in the process of divorcing. Because Kurt and Courtney had a pre-nuptial agreement, Courtney would have received little if the divorce had gone through.
In the book, Kurt’s grandfather Leland Cobain goes public for the first time, charging that his grandson was murdered. He joins a chorus of others close to Kurt and Courtney who now dispute the official verdict.
Max Wallace has written for the Sunday New York Times and contributed to the BBC while Ian Halperin is a frequent correspondent for Court TV and has contributed to 60 Minutes 2.
